Pigeonhole – A simple solution to a cost problem

Pigeonhole – A simple solution to a cost problem

The property industry is one of the Australian economic powerhouses, with assets to be constructed, managed, maintained, bought and sold, all in an environment of cost sensitivity and regulation.

Recent studies using AI and Geolocation information estimate there are over 20 million buildings in Australia (https://www.spatialsource.com.au/gis-data/many-buildings-australia-geoscape-counting), of which Australian Government Building disclosures (http://www.cbd.gov.au/registers/cbd-downloadable-data-set) show over 152k buildings as ‘Commercial’.  

Every building requires compliance information; every building requires maintenance for insurance and liability exposures; every building has interactions with humans for work to be done.  The ability, or lack thereof, to access building documentation in a timely and efficient manner is an enormous cost to the property sector and the balance sheet of building owners. If you could save money, that would be capital that could be redeployed elsewhere or returned to shareholders. 

What if there was a ‘Pigeonhole’ or easy to use document repository that gave you a home for your building documentation?  What if the Pigeonhole allowed building owners and managers to share documents with contractors, staff, or regulators at a moment’s notice? How much money, time and effort, would building owners save or costs would they avoid?

Let’s create a hypothetical yet realistic set of scenarios for ONE building, and if an asset manager owns 100 buildings, then the savings compound 100x.  

Let’s assume that the average hourly rate for a contractor doing building maintenance is $100, which is a low estimate but makes the math simple.  Let’s assume that a 25-floor building has twenty contractors working in the building at some point every day. Those contractors are helping refit floors, make repairs, doing compliance assessments, working on capital projects, and managing the facilities.

Every person requires access to plans, to make sure that they are doing work in the right area, to avoid rework or find issues quickly.  If they do not have timely access to building documentation, they may waste 30-60 minutes every day. That costs money. Twenty contractors, 30 minutes every day, 220 working days a year, at $100 per hour, is a cost to building owners of $220k per year.  That does not include double-time for weekends, call-out charges, or the psychological benefits of knowing you have the documentation an auditor or senior executive requires at a moment’s notice. It does not include the liability positions for exposures such as the current cladding issues facing many buildings, which could result in significant penalties to building owners.  

Having a simple digital home, or Pigeonhole, for your building documentation will generate significant savings for building owners and the industry at a fraction of the current costs.   For the example above, our client may have a one-off project spend to digitise and upload their legacy documentation to Pigeonhole, at an estimated cost of $1 per document for 15000 documents, so a spend of $15k. The Annual subscription cost for Pigeonhole for a building of 25-floors would be $5k.  Compare this to the annual time cost of over $200k, and you have a significant saving for any building owner.

We believe the business case is compelling. We believe that by working with our customers, we can make significant progress on our mission is to remove cost from industry and to use Cloud-based technology to provide simple solutions for the benefit of all.